An ever increasing demand for cloud-based and virtualized services is rapidly changing existing network services and storage environments. For example, existing stand-alone storage environments are rapidly being replaced with large storage environments such as data centers, which are physically and/or logically separated from one another. Such large storage environments present new challenges to service providers such as performance requirements, latency, reliability, scalability, and the like. When cloud-based service providers fail to adequately address such challenges, underlying cloud-based services for customers may suffer (e.g., outages, downtime, reduced performance, etc.).
In an effort to overcome these challenges, cloud-based service providers increasingly employ various network monitoring technologies to meet or exceed customer expectations for services (e.g., performance, latency, reliability, scalability, etc.). However, such network monitoring technologies often prove problematic when scaling to accommodate the scope, size, and complexity of data center networks.